手
Symbols Beauty
handmade
工
ㄕㄡˇ ㄍㄨㄥ shǒu gōng
Two versions of the same picture, and both are free with no account and no watermark. The first has no background at all, which is the one to send your artist — but a phone or computer photo viewer set to dark will show black strokes on dark grey and it can look like nothing downloaded. If that happens, use the second one: identical characters on a plain white background. Either way you get the characters on their own — the square and the faint guide lines you see above are not in the file. Each character is 1000px, so a two-character download is 2000×1000, and the script and layout are the ones you picked.
Script
Characters
Same in both
Layout
Rubbing mode: white on black, as a stone rubbing. The download is unaffected.
Made by hand rather than by machine. Chinese has two everyday words for this, and one of them arrived from Japanese.
Before you commit
Choose with care手 alone means hand and nothing more. Handmade needs both characters - a bare 手 reads as an anatomical label.
Japanese手作 comes from Japanese 手作り (tezukuri). Taiwanese shops use it constantly, but a Japanese reader will see it as their own word.
At small sizesSeven strokes over two characters. Wide, open and clean at any size, including on tightly curved placements.
Meaning
Handmade; handwork, done by hand rather than by machine.
The plain word - 手工製作 is what a label says when nothing was machine made.
Other characters for “handmade”
What to do next
Pick the script and layout you want above, download the PNG, and send that file to your artist. Ask them to work from the file rather than redrawing the character freehand — that is where strokes go missing.
Related concepts